Learn Penetration Testing: Understand the art of penetration testing and develop your white hat hacker skills

Book Description

Sending information via the internet is not entirely private, as evidenced by the rise in hacking, malware attacks, and security threats. With the help of this book, you’ll learn crucial penetration testing techniques to help you evaluate enterprise defenses.

You’ll start by understanding each stage of pentesting and deploying target virtual machines, including Linux and Windows. Next, the book will guide you through performing intermediate penetration testing in a controlled environment. With the help of practical use cases, you’ll also be able to implement your learning in real-world scenarios. By studying everything from setting up your lab, information gathering and password attacks, through to social engineering and post exploitation, you’ll be able to successfully overcome security threats. The book will even help you leverage the best tools, such as Kali Linux, Metasploit, Burp Suite, and other open source pentesting tools to perform these techniques. Toward the later chapters, you’ll focus on best practices to quickly resolve security threats.

By the end of this book, you’ll be well versed with various penetration testing techniques so as to be able to tackle security threats effectively

What you will learn

• Perform entry-level penetration tests by learning various concepts and techniques
• Understand both common and not-so-common vulnerabilities from an attacker’s perspective
• Get familiar with intermediate attack methods that can be used in real-world scenarios
• Understand how vulnerabilities are created by developers and how to fix some of them at source code level
• Become well versed with basic tools for ethical hacking purposes
• Exploit known vulnerable services with tools such as Metasploit

Who this book is for

If you’re just getting started with penetration testing and want to explore various security domains, this book is for you. Security professionals, network engineers, and amateur ethical hackers will also find this book useful. Prior knowledge of penetration testing and ethical hacking is not necessary.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Penetration Testing
2. Getting Started with Kali Linux
3. Performing Information Gathering
4. Mastering Social Engineering
5. Diving into the Metasploit Framework
6. Understanding Password Attacks
7. Working with Burp Suite
8. Attacking Web Applications
9. Getting Started with Wireless Attacks
10. Moving Laterally and Escalating Your Privileges
11. Antivirus Evasion
12. Maintaining Control within the Environment
13. Reporting and Acting on Your Findings
14. Where Do I Go from Here?
15. Assessments